Amy Schumer has not been absent from tv through the six years because the finish of her intermittently good sketch present, “Inside Amy Schumer.” She’s had a few Netflix stand-up specials and made a detour into actuality TV (“Amy Schumer Learns to Cook dinner,” “Anticipating Amy”). Subsequent week she’ll be an Oscars host.
Nonetheless, the autobiographical-ish “Life & Beth,” premiering Friday on Hulu, seems like a return. It’s not a triumphant one, but it surely has touches of the outdated Schumer, sensible and transgressive and self-aware. They’re stretched out somewhat too thinly over the ten half-hour episodes, and so they don’t actually compensate for the general sentimentality and simplistic psychology. However for the true fan, they’ll be well worth the comparatively quick binge.
Schumer created “Life & Beth” and wrote half the episodes (she additionally directed 4), and the identified congruences between her life and that of her heroine, Beth Jones, align it with different private reveals by feminine comedians like “Someone Someplace,” “One Mississippi” and “Higher Issues.” Beth, like Schumer, attended highschool in suburban Lengthy Island; like Schumer, she skilled a change in life-style when her father’s enterprise failed. Schumer has spoken about her husband, Chris Fischer, being on the autism spectrum; Beth’s romantic curiosity, John (Michael Cera), demonstrates a pronounced, if typically charming, social and private awkwardness.
Schumer takes the style in her personal route, although, by welding collectively its standard narrative — the melancholy story of self-discovery — and her most popular mode in movies, the bawdy, ugly duckling romantic comedy.
Beth, an sad Manhattan wine saleswoman, experiences a private loss that sends her on a reminiscence journey by way of her Lengthy Island childhood and forces her to confront her emotions about her judgmental, needy mom (Laura Benanti). As occasions within the current set off continuous flashbacks to Beth’s childhood, it’s as if Schumer had been digging up the roots of her personal stage persona.
Happening on the identical time is the rom-com, through which Beth blows up her relationship with a man-child co-worker (Kevin Kane) and begins to fall for farmer John, who tends to the greens and animals at a Lengthy Island winery.
The 2 story strands are related — Beth’s attraction to the country John, and her reintroduction to Lengthy Island’s pure magnificence, is a part of the mellowing course of that ultimately permits her to reconcile herself to her previous. Nevertheless it’s a superficial tie, and the present’s tone and elegance swerve between the extra solemn household materials and the extra comedian love story.
There are highlights on either side, largely in what really feel like stand-alone sequences which have the power and inventiveness that Schumer delivered to sketch comedy. Jonathan Groff reveals up in an amusing bit as a Lengthy Island Lothario who’s interested in Beth due to her Manhattan connection; his obsessive love for town is true out of an early Billy Joel tune. An extended scene through which Beth; John; and Beth’s sister, Ann (Susannah Flood), fish whereas on mushrooms has an attractive, improvisatory vibe. Serving to to maintain issues fascinating is an eclectic array of visitor stars who embrace Hank Azaria as a dyspeptic funeral director and David Byrne as a health care provider with a clumsy bedside method.
The easy, emotionally grounded performing that a lot of “Life & Beth” requires isn’t Schumer’s energy, however Flood and Benanti give her wonderful help. (Violet Younger, Lily Fisher and Grace Energy are additionally good as Beth, Ann and Beth’s greatest pal within the flashbacks.) And Michael Rapaport, as Beth’s flawed however charismatic father, Leonard, gives some touching moments. He’s showcased within the sequence’s greatest sequence, a tense, bravura scene through which Leonard rallies himself to assist Beth purchase a vital account.
That top level is adopted by a theatrical kicker that feels tacked-on and trite — Beth is wowed by a bunch of girls dancing dramatically in a fountain, then climbs in to affix them — and that’s the sample of “Life & Beth.” The flashes of comedian and dramatic inspiration come and go in a narrative that doesn’t maintain itself and whose revelations about Beth’s previous, whereas they’ve drive on paper, don’t register very strongly onscreen.
Within the final episode, a fringe character sums up what Beth has realized about life in a single, comically banal sentence. It’s a humorous line, as delivered, however you could really feel that the joke was on you.